1/12/07

He was one of the most benign, positive, loving people I'd ever known, and in fact he wrote and performed a Gnostic mass to marry me and my wife.

It was an extraordinary thing, invoking everyone from Hermes Trismigestus to Mozart and Vivaldi and everyone in between to smile on our union and actually felt as if the heavens opened and all of them looked down and so, "If Bob sez yer ok, then yer ok with us."

Of course we DID preface the ceremony by piling everyone in attendance into cars to follow us intoTilden Park where we all rode the Merry-go-Round there before the ceremony. Maybe that was what did it. Who knows?

He left an amazing body of work behind*, one a mutual friend described as so:

"Coming across one of his books unexpectedly could be the philosophical and spiritual equivalent of getting kidnapped by pirates, or running off to join the circus -- you might get home again eventually, but you won't be the same person who left.

He asked questions that no one else ever thought to ask, and suggested answers that no one had ever thought of to questions that everyone has asked.

But he always preferred the questions to the answers."

***************

But despite the books, he will be missed, a gnomic looking fellow with that Bugs Bunny Brooklyn accent that made the most arcane comments or answers to things that had been baffling as open and unpretentious and understandable as anything your neighbor might say to you while you're both taking out the trash.

"Why the bunny, Bob? The Easter Bunny? I mean, ok, eggs in springtime. But why the bunny?"

"Ehhh, Osiris. Osiris was the rabbit. Resurrected, remember? Osiris was the rabbit."

"Oh, ok."

We'll miss you, Bob, even the people who didn't know you.

*The Illuminatus! trilogy (with Robert Shea), of course, and the Schrodinger's Cat Trilogy, The Cosmic Trigger series, Prometheus Rising, Right Where You Are Sitting Now, Wilhelm Reich in Hell, and a lot of others...